Jim Carrey is one of the most beloved comedians ever. From Ace Ventura to Liar Liar, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to The Truman Show, whenever he appears on camera he's guaranteed to make the production better - even if everything else sucks. Once upon a time, the Canadian comic was best-known for (literally) talking out of his ass. But as the years have passed and he's gotten older, Carrey hasn't been afraid to reveal a softer, gentler, more introspective side to his nature.
It turns out that he's got a philosophical bent, a method actor's approach to his work, and recently he's been dabbling in art and painting. Yes, on social media, Jim Carrey is better known for his grotesque and satirical cartoon caricatures, which he regularly posts to his 18.6 million Twitter followers. He has often been vocal in the past about his own voting preferences, and in the case of Republican President Donald Trump, he hasn't been afraid to mince words regarding his opinion of him and his administration.
Carrey's latest venture in his ongoing anti-Trump art campaign was to create a new cartoon, based on a famous newspaper strip that many of us are familiar with. In a picture posted to his Twitter feed, Carrey sketched the cartoon figure of a little boy urinating on Trump’s grave. The picture was captioned: "Oh how I urine for this all to be over!" The little boy in the picture, who had spiky hair and striped shirt on, looked uncannily similar to the character of Calvin, from Bill Waterson's seminal 1985-1995 newspaper strip Calvin and Hobbes.
Just prior to this, Carrey had posted another caricature of Trump and Kim Jong-un at their meeting at Singapore. This particular piece was captioned: "Let’s Make A Deal: You’ll be a real world leader. I’ll sway the midterm elections. And together we will save the world from the bloodthirsty Canadians."
What has led the famous funnyman to pursue art so voraciously? A documentary released in August 2017 called I Needed Colour shed some light on Carrey's artistic exploits. Carrey revealed that he had got back into art as a form of therapy after the death of his former girlfriend Cathriona White in 2015, explaining that: "Suddenly ... at a time when I was trying to heal a broken heart, I decided 'well maybe I'll paint.' When your heart is in love you're floating weightless. But when you lose that love, you have to re-enter the atmosphere and it can get pretty rough."
He added: "When I started painting a lot, I became so obsessed that there was nowhere to move in my home. The paintings became part of the furniture; I was eating on them. I found myself looking around myself, on a really bleak winter in New York, and it was just so depressing, and I think I needed colour."
Nowadays Carrey's art seems to be less about therapy and more about his own outrage. But one thing's for sure, it never fails to be provocative.